


HEAT HAZE

by winluvr



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Character Study, Friends With Benefits, M/M, Non Linear Narrative, Open Ending, Relationship Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-25
Updated: 2020-09-25
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:16:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26647372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winluvr/pseuds/winluvr
Summary: Erected statues, all fragments of alabaster and cement, all sculpted better than those made for warriors, made for heroes. He had been a hero to Atsumu too, somehow, when he drove him to white-knuckle pleasure and called it generosity, an act of altruism. His violence as a form of romance, then his forgiveness as another.a boy reduced to nothing but a phenomenon.
Relationships: Implied/Referenced Miya Atsumu/Sakusa Kiyoomi, Miya Atsumu/Kunimi Akira
Comments: 4
Kudos: 23





	HEAT HAZE

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [venus trine mars](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26199367) by [fatal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fatal/pseuds/fatal). 
  * Inspired by [your teeth in my neck](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26562007) by [papertulips](https://archiveofourown.org/users/papertulips/pseuds/papertulips). 



“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you  all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”

— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Kunimi looks at Atsumu. A gust of wind billows through his hair, fanning it all around his face. In this light, Kunimi looks beautiful. Atsumu feels his eyes glaze over whenever he looks at him, vision going blurry whenever he lets himself to look for too long. Like how your eyes strain whenever you look directly into the sun, like how easy yet so filled with peril it is to be drawn to the bright red and orange sparks of a welding torch. Like the aftermath of a fire, where you can almost see the heat accumulating around you. The light bends, and everything shimmers under your eyelids. A boy turned to nothing but something illusory. The landscape of his body distorted. A boy reduced to nothing but a phenomenon.

* * *

“Akira,” he tries out, the syllables falling off so effortlessly from his tongue. He says again, “‘Kira, will you be staying the night?”

Kunimi nods his head once instead of gracing him with an answer. Then, he adds, “Your roommate won’t be home tonight, right?”

“Yeah. Told me he’d be out on a night out with friends.” Atsumu shrugs. “Went dashin’ out the door the moment he told me. Must have gotten dicked down or something. Or the other way around. I don’t really know anythin’ about him even after three months.”

Kunimi spares a laugh at this, his eyes crinkling into crescents. “Guess he’s one of those secretive types.” He leans back onto the sofa, falling into the space between Atsumu’s broad shoulders. “It’s always the quiet ones that have the most secrets, after all.”

“Yeah,” Atsumu agrees.  _ Just like you,  _ he wants to say.  _ I don’t know shit about you. I want to know you, wanna know anything you wanna tell me.  _ Instead, he shakes the thought away, biting down his tongue before he even has the chance to say anything stupid, say anything that could be perceived as too curious, overfamiliar.

* * *

Atsumu knows it’s not really aligned with the ethics of having a fuckbuddy or a friend that you slept with at least two nights a week to have some sort of lingering feelings toward them, but how could he have known? How could he have known, the first time Kunimi ever slipped a mindless hand between his thighs, his body unaware of its own autonomy, then the hand replaced with a line of teeth, air fluttering around the skin of his inner thighs where Kunimi had kissed him? The line of teeth, exchanged with the curve of his red mouth frowning around the lines of Atsumu’s body. Kunimi could have kissed his bones with how cold he felt around him. Dragged his hands and let them hang over Atsumu’s marble anatomy.

* * *

“Fuck,” Kunimi says. “Atsumu, Atsumu. Kiss me harder, please.” He cups Atsumu’s face in his hands to pull him even closer toward him, fingertips digging into his cheeks. “You’re too soft. Too soft.”

_ Ya know I can’t kiss you like that,  _ Atsumu wants to say.  _ I just might break you and I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.  _ Instead, he complies with all his demands, spine turned liquid under his touch.

“Okay.” Atsumu kisses him open-mouthed, tongue dipping into the spaces of his mouth. Hovering just over the ridges of his teeth like he’s panning for gold. His palates turned into a craving. Like he’s trying to swallow him alive. Like he’s a beast searching for a prey.

* * *

All of Atsumu’s body, made a shrine for one boy, a pair of hands. And neither of them believed in a god, really, never believed in the reverence of anything other than themselves. But Atsumu knew he could consider the gods’ existence, maybe, if his faith could be somehow related to the way Kunimi’s fingers dipped right into the hollow of Atsumu’s star-bursted, sun-shaken hips. The sharp of his angled jaw, the supple of Kunimi’s cheek burrowing right into the juncture of his neck and shoulder. His skillful hands interlocking every single part of his body into an endless mosaic. The trajectory turned seamless to praise him. All of his body, devoted to little else but an apparition. Nothing more than a shadow, a hallucination. A boy turned ghost-like and pale-faced, a body into calcite crystals.

* * *

Atsumu’s old jersey shorts had been tugged precariously down his hips. The old, breathless feeling of his head barely rising above sea level, floating over cold streams of water. Atsumu falters as he is tucked into the bed sheets with the glorious temptations of age-old desires burrowing back into his skin, new hands skimming all over his body, like it was something to burrow their face in, something made of miracles that they dives in, head-first, with reckless haste.

Everything is old here in his empty apartment. The wallpaper that had started peeling off months ago and Atsumu had never bothered to replace. Too much of a hassle to fix up an apartment for just one boy to reside in. Tissue boxes, each equipped with a hand-stitched tissue cover that had been a gift from his mother, just like almost everything else in their house. One for each room in the house, a piece of tissue utilized for more than just blowing his nose. The staple rice cooker to cook steamed rice for all his meals. The water measured with the joint of his middle finger, a trick his  _ obaa-han _ had told him and his brother as little children before passing away just months before they turned thirteen. Thirteen and even younger and even more naive. Atsumu turned twenty three not long ago and had found himself coming back to his earlier and more naive roots.

House slippers to wear inside and step on the tatami floor, then a new pair of slippers for the bathroom. The kotatsu that stands in the heart of his home, which had been bought from some Western online shopping service for only a sixth of the price if it were to be bought from a more, well,  _ authentic  _ source. Atsumu had felt a bit embarrassed to be a little too frugal with his shopping choices, but it saved enough of his money that he wouldn’t have to live through life paycheck to paycheck. The kotatsu brought out for colder days and the foldaway table in tow for warmer days, for his visitors.

Atsumu rarely had visitors nowadays. Not when Osamu was living all the way over to Hirakata. A nine hour drive and a half, maybe less if he would just disregard his morals and be a bad driver for a day and go over the speed limits. Neither of them could bother to make the drive, so weeks of not seeing each other outside of video calls when they had enough time turned to months into years. It had been two years since he last saw Osamu and even longer since he last saw Kita-san. They’d both been so busy with the whole rice business that they hadn’t been able to spare much of their precious time to come up and visit Atsumu in his now lonely apartment. 

Atsumu couldn’t help but feel a flickering sense of envy as he had watched the two of them make themselves busy as they tended to the farm together.  _ Their  _ farm. Matching towels slung around their necks, both of their backs facing the sun. Atsumu had wondered back then just how sweet it would be to belong with someone like that. It had been two years since he had them over. Even more than that since he had last seen Sakusa. Atsumu couldn’t help but shift his mind to him, wondering about his recent whereabouts. How long had it been since he and Sakusa had laid under the kotatsu, after Sakusa had complained about how drafty the weather felt that day, with Atsumu prying open a mikan orange for him? How long had it been since he had willingly laid with Atsumu like that? How long had it been since their hands had last found one another? And so Atsumu rarely brings out the kotatsu nowadays, not even during the colder months where winter seems to envelope him in its cold.

And so Atsumu often sits in his apartment, alone. A glass of hot sake to warm his body up before he lays himself to sleep. Staggers into his bedroom with a pronounced, drunken gait. It hadn’t been enough to intoxicate him and send him off to a wish-wash flurry, but it had been enough to leave his body feeling warm, so warm, even just for tonight, and his head feather-light as he floated down the empty hallways. Now, Kunimi slips off his work shoes, black leather, and leaves them in the genkan. He steps over the heap of shoes, careful not to step on the clean white slippers that Atsumu had brought home once from a hotel somewhere on the other side of the country. He edges himself right into the cramped space of his home, then the rumpled sheets of his bed, then the hollow area between his heart and chest. Swims right into Atsumu’s little heart.

Kunimi does not spend too long wandering about on the genkan and instead, invites himself right in. There is no pot of green tea brewing in the background, which Atsumu had gotten used to doing for other people. For Kita-san, who liked sipping piping hot tea poured out from whistling kettles, sort of like his grandmother. There is no bowl of oranges laid out in the center for the whole world to see. The whole world, or maybe for just one person. They were typically set out for Sakusa, who liked peeling his satsumas like he was dissecting something that was still alive and breathing. Used his hands like a scalpel, his movements tender over soft pulp.

Kunimi lies with Atsumu tonight. He does not always spend the night, burdened with prior appointments and future agendas, his mind always caught up with the past and the future. But he’s lying with Atsumu now, and that’s all that matters, really. In the entirety of his whole apartment, his whole world inherited from the age of his mother’s birth, everything was ancient and passed down from generation to generation, bloodline to bloodline. Everything had been born of ancient traditions and old desires, except for Kunimi. Everything except Kunimi, who was half-baked and raw. But still an object of his desire. His heart beating loud against his chest **.**

* * *

And maybe then, Atsumu thinks that he had misplaced his faith somehow, misattributed his beliefs to another lost boy. Atsumu doesn’t know when the world had split under his feet, the light shifting to reveal just how reckless he had become in the past few years. The sun-burnt sinews of his skin had said nothing more of his newfound rashness than the sins he had committed under the all-encompassing sheets of starlight. How could he have helped it, really, when Kunimi had bowed his head and went on his knees to serve him like he had traces of martyrdom around his mouth, when he had moaned red-lipped, slick-warmed incantations around him?

* * *

What is this, if it isn’t love? Atsumu wonders. How long had it been, after all, since he last stood with someone under the sheet of the nightHe looks down at Kunimi and watches as he licks a stripe on the skin of his inner thigh. “Fuck, Akira.” The name falls off his lips like something memorized, like something they have practiced. 

His knees tremble as Kunimi puts his hands to work on him. “Akira, please.” Without thinking, Atsumu tugs Kunimi’s head down with a heavy, shaking hand. His fingers run through his hair, raking through the course of his dark bangs, that has always looked like it would be so soft to touch. What is this, if it isn’t something fleeting? How long, how long would it take for this to die down?

* * *

The world had shifted in the hour he had spent awake, their bodies swathed in the sheets of starlight. Atsumu had looked into his eyes that night and saw something burning bright with desire. Vicious, lethal. Like the embers of a fire that had not yet died down. Small, smoldering pieces of coal struck down from a wildfire. Like the smallest amount of gasoline that had been ignited with a flicker of lighter fluid. Translucent and volatile. Slow-forming, the flames eruptive and quick-burning. He had peered into his eyes and saw someone more like him, nothing else but a lost boy, a boy left out into the open, in the cool, thickening air of the hard, cruel world. A boy with his knuckles blown white, bursting open at the seams. A boy who had used his mouth, his sly tongue and dry wit to turn the world into something that seeped through the gaps of his fingers. All in the name of love, after all. It’s all done in the name of love. Let them turn this into love, rather than just longing. Let them turn this into love and not longing, not anymore. How long had it been since they have been in love, after all? How long it had been since.

* * *

Atsumu had looked into his eyes and saw little else but dust. The dust of dying stars, maybe, if stars could hang so low in space, into the smooth, parallel layers of earth’s fluid atmosphere. If only stars could hang so low, right into the earth’s troposphere. Kunimi had looked at him back, his eyes blown wide as he raised them toward Atsumu’s face. His skin flaring red with its exertion, flushed with afterglow. His bones turned heavy under his brightened flesh, his chest rising and falling, his mouth slick and kiss-bitten. Kunimi’s body barely leaves the smallest hint of an indent on the foam of the mattress that Atsumu smoothens half an hour before he takes the first step to his apartment. Kunimi’s body barely left a hairline crack, the smallest swell as he reclines unto Atsumu’s bare marble body. How could the world be so cruel to a boy caught within the turbulence? How could a boy be so cruel to a boy of his own kind?

* * *

The sun blisters. The land is dry. Dipping over the top of a hill, the sky pirouettes, pale blue and pink and white stretching out above their heads, almost endless as it bounds over their world. Beside them is a honey-soaked paradise. The sun looks golden now, like flax on a spinning wheel. Stalks of rice before their feet that have just been soaked in the stream. The horizon intersects. Atsumu shines in the light. A sliver of red sun trickles down the leaves of the forest, down the ground where they stand with their feet apart, bodies barely touching. It feels like a century has passed since they last touched. Hundreds and hundreds of years since, like they’ve travelled back to the Edo period. Kingdoms of salt and gold, rolled into just one memory, red in a boy’s eyes. Atsumu wonders about just what it would feel like to cram himself in one boy’s cortex.

The ocean fizzles out from behind them. A stream of water flows like fluid butter into the river below the hill. In the summer, they would have had their legs splayed out from behind them, their backs flush against white sand. White sand, sparkling molten in the sun like quartz, like diamonds. Their eyes sparkling like dolomite. In the summer, he would have peeled a clementine into Kunimi’s spread out hands until it came undone, smooth and glossy, held under their fingers. Everything falls into place. After that, oblivion. Atsumu spends a night thinking about Kunimi’s hands and just what he would like to do with them. What he would like to do with him. Spends a night thinking about what it would feel like to turn into crystal lattice under his prodding hands around his neck. What it would feel like to melt into layers and layers and  _ layers _ of stone.

* * *

But Atsumu couldn’t stop thinking of him even as he flashes his back toward him as he leaves, couldn’t stop touching himself to the memory of Kunimi’s mouth wrapped flush around him, lips hovering over his boxers as his fingers looped around the waist band. Atsumu sighed as he finished that night, his loose-screwed mind driven wild by the implications of anything Kunimi had ever told him, the thoughts that lingered right down the chambers of his red, red heart. Kunimi could drive him insane, almost, with the way he whispered sweet nothings and half-truths in his ear like he could have divulged a secret. Atsumu tore his gaze away before it could all turn into a murder. He looked down at Kunimi who had his hands scrubbed raw and tender, shaking from the wet, sticky feeling of blood. Atsumu looked away before his body became little else but a crime scene of sorts and could now only see red.

* * *

“Why did yer tongue have to be so sharp, Akira?”

“You want me to be more, what, tender to you? You want me to be more kind with my words? I can tell you then.” Kunimi breathes againdt Atsumu’s clavicle. “I’ll tell you that I have never craved attention until I knew yours.”  _ One, two; three _ slow breaths as he moves toward him. “Never wanted to taste anything else more than the salt of your skin, never wanted to hear anything else more than the sound of your voice in the morning. Never wanted anything.”

* * *

Here he is, standing in the middle of another surreal manifestation of his, looking at Kunimi who’s been looking back at him, all this time. The corners of his lips quirk up as he sees Atsumu, leans in and kisses the curve of his jaw. Kisses him, kisses him, kisses him until he dissolves into little else but flesh and static electricity. He nips at the skin on his neck until it flushes bright red and bruises a dark shade of purple under the sweeping lights. An untouchable dream, the star of all of Atsumu’s nights spent awake under black nights and sheets of white noise. Atsumu looks at his windowsill and sees Kunimi standing, undressed and beautiful against neon lights and high-rise buildings. Kunimi against towering shrines and snow-syruped mountaintops, all pale and moon-glazed and pretty.

* * *

Atsumu tries to catch his breath once Kunimi pulls away from the kiss. “Kissin’ you feels like you're trying to place my head underwater, Akira.” He's falling headlong into Kunimi's eyes.

* * *

Atsumu blinks the sleep away from his eyes as he finally wakes, a shadow of another boy’s body imprinted on his bed. He had seen Tokyo in all of its beauty when he saw Kunimi under all of it. He had seen Kunimi under the gates of Tokyo. The panoramic view of the ruins of a blown-away castle, the ancient statue of an even more ancient warrior propped up unto a horse. Lake formed from a volcano, tucked away under the thick mists of white fog. Vibrant waterfalls stretching out from behind him, wider and broader in his eyes, more and more beautiful as the course of the river fills out. He had stood in awe as his gaze settled on the mirror reflection of the boy the first time he saw him.

* * *

Kunimi’s sitting beside Atsumu in his apartment now, their legs tucked under each other as they sit on his two-seater sofa and it all feels just like one of his daydreams. Kunimi reaches for a sip of his Pepsi and Atsumu hands it to him, letting him put his lips around the mouth of the bottle where his mouth had touched. Couldn’t help but look at Kunimi and wish he were the bottle. Kunimi’s gaze drops to the box of pale blue face masks on his coffee table, old but still unopened. The air diffuser, the muscle relief patches. A green bottle of eucalyptus oil. Atsumu pushes them all away.

A girl painted under backdrops of neon green. Her head awash in sheets of paling shades of black and white, then drenched in green and red and all the colors of the world rolled into one, like she had been submerged in an underworld filled with vivid scenes behind her as a backdrop to a long, drawn-out monologue. Brooding and beautiful, her bangs hanging long down her forehead and the side of her face, a cigarette held between her fingers, the neon panels of the mise-en-scene falling into place so perfectly. Green has never been any more melancholy. Green has never been more beautiful. The film’s cinematography is like another of his lost-boy dreams.

Beside him, Kunimi stirs. Moves toward Atsumu until he’s almost sitting on his lap, long legs tucked just beside his hips. “We can recreate that, you know,” he murmurs, low into Atsumu’s skin, his breath fanning warm against him. “Just you and me and the world. I think I’ll be a better actress. Maybe you could be a better actor.” Tilts his finger toward Takeshi Kaneshiro on the big screen, then places it on Atsumu’s cheek to tug his jaw toward him. “Can’t say you’re any bit more gorgeous than him, though, Atsumu-san.”

The leads of the film zips toward an endless sunrise behind them, or maybe toward a point where the surface of the earth meets the sky, sitting on a Yamaha TZR 125 as their bodies slide past, then outside the tunnel, but no pair of eyes are trained on the horizon. Their eyes flit past the film, then at each other. Atsumu could feel Kunimi’s half-lidded gaze settle into the growing crease that mars the space between his brows, then down the bridge of his nose, even further down as it finally makes its way to his parted lips. 

“Oh, oh, you want to kiss me so bad right now.” Atsumu grins and nudges his head into the crook of Kunimi’s neck as he pulls him closer to him, his hands wrapped around his waist. Kunimi’s softer like this, so soft whenever Atsumu touches him.  _ I don’t even hafta act like I’m in love with you when yer touching me like this.  _ “Don’t get me wrong, sweetheart, I love it when you kiss me, but you only ever want to kiss me like this when you’re drunk off yer mind.”

Kunimi laughs around Atsumu’s mouth, the sound coming out sweet and heady as it travels between them. “Yeah, but isn’t that what makes this convenient?” He presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth. “And you only ever hold me like this when you’re high.” He threads his fingers into the belt loops of Atsumu’s jeans and inches his face closer and closer toward him. “Didn’t you notice?”

_ Oh, oh, how easy it is to want you, _ Atsumu thinks as he dips his head low into the indent of Kunimi’s shoulder blade, breathing in his bergamot scent. Sunny, sweet, slipping into his skin just like a hint of summer. Smelling just like he had stood in close proximity with the sun, his skin warmed brown and his body like the earth. And suddenly, Atsumu is gone. He’s gone, falling headlong in his eyes, the backdrop framing them like they’re the leads of a stark, vibrant neo-noir film.  _ How easy it is to love you, Akira.  _ Their eyes joining each other in the pale light of the room, their bodies in a constant ceremony as the sounds they make bounce off each other.

“Notice what, Akira?” The words sound thick and guttural coming from the bottom of Atsumu’s throat. “Notice how much?” He licks a stripe up the sharp of Kunimi’s jaw, then lets his mouth rest just below the lobe of one ear. No silver flash of an earring in sight, no other thing, nothing else except Kunimi. The film has stopped playing behind them, the credits roll finally being doled out as it bathes the television in pitch black. Kunimi shivers in his touch.

Atsumu whispers into the cave of his ear. “Notice how much.” Nips his teeth around his ear. Sinks his teeth right into it, brushing away the sweat-slick bangs hanging down the sides of his face.“I wanna kiss you.” Allows his hands to rest on Kunimi’s hips, running them up and down his body. His skin feels endless, almost, whenever Atsumu touches him with some sort of a reverence, a blind faith. A blind faith utilized to touch the boy like he’s reading braille. “‘Til the only thing falling off yer pretty lips is my name.” 

Atsumu kisses him gently. Couldn’t stand being the one to hold the knife when he breaks under his deft fingers, dissolves back into the genesis of whatever he’s made of. But Kunimi leans in and tries to kiss him hard. Harder, almost like he’s allowing Atsumu to break him. Like he couldn’t care less about fissures in his marble island, cracks forming over his flesh. “I’ll kiss you until you’re endless.”

“Kiss me until I’m endless. Kiss me until I’m breathless,” Atsumu murmurs. There’s no end in sight. There’s no light at the end of the tunnel, not now, not when Kunimi holds him like this, like he’s in the process of making him evaporate. “I’d like to see ya try.”

“Wanna kiss you until you’re breathless.” Kunimi rocks his hips along the course of Atsumu’s lap, his lips still pressing the softest of kisses to the slant of his mouth, the smooth curve of his jaw. “I want you to fuck me. Fuck me until I’m the only one you want.” 

* * *

He had seen him in his dreams and he looked beautiful. He looked guileless, almost, so devoid of guilt that Atsumu could have let him wrap his hands around his neck and clawed at the skin of his thigh if it would make him happy. He had seen him in real life, his body flowing into Atsumu’s hands in real time. And in Atsumu’s eyes, he could have put together an altar for his body with his bare hands. Erected statues, all fragments of alabaster and cement, all sculpted better than those made for warriors, made for heroes. He had been a hero to Atsumu too, somehow, when he drove him to white-knuckle pleasure and called it generosity, an act of altruism. His violence as a form of romance, then his forgiveness as another.

* * *

Atsumu presses his palms over the parts where Kunimi feels a little softer, his abdomen softer than Atsumu’s much harder one. He feels his hands dissolve into the part of Kunimi’s stomach that spills out. There’s an unidentifiable heat swirling in his own as he touches him. Something close to heartburn lingers on his tongue.

“You don’t,” Atsumu murmurs against his mouth, tasting slow and sweet. He smelled a little like smoke from the cigarettes that he had fished out from his coat pocket, but he always tasted so sweet like the caramel candies he always chewed on.“You know you don’t hafta act like you’re still a stranger to me, ‘Nimi. Thought we’ve gotten over that already. You don’t have to be so cold with me.”

Kunimi laughs and the sound comes slow, sweet. Atsumu has never known a laugh that had sounded so much like a dream. “I’ve never kissed a stranger quite as lonely as you are. Couldn’t help it. I might break you someday if I wouldn’t be careful with you.”

Still, Kunimi presses his hands to the center of Atsumu’s chest where there is a hole shaped like a volleyball. One shaped like a Mikasa MVA 200 volleyball. Shaped like home, if home could also be the seamless trajectory of a ball into steady, steady hands. He moves his hands down, his eyes taking in the rest of Atsumu’s body. Curious, then hungry. Eyes set ablaze, burning bright red.

“I don’t want ya to be careful, Kunimi.” Atsumu lets out a rough moan from the bottom of his throat. “There’s nothing left in me for you to break.” He watches as Kunimi sits on his lap, hands on his hips so he could steady him. “I just want ya to have me in any way you want. Any way you want, I mean it. I’ll let you have me.”

Kunimi smirks down at him. The expression that tugs along the corners of his face is something akin to one of Atsumu’s cocksure grins. “You know, Atsumu.” Then, corrects himself, “Atsumu-san, I’ve never been friends with someone so willing to comply.”

Atsumu laughs a little. “And I’ve never been with a stranger nearly as cold as you are.” He presses his hands to the center of Kunimi’s chest where there is a crater shaped like hands, shaped like a boy. It grows larger and larger the longer he touches him, and he wants to pull his hands away like Kunimi had set him on fire. He pulls his hands away, a gust of smoke forming on the lines of his palm.

* * *

Kunimi looks like he could have been the muse of an underground artist back in the twentieth century. Maybe one of those artists who could only afford, back then, those water-based acrylic paints that came in small pots and thin tubes in widely varying hues. Couldn’t paint just any face with such a limited palette, but if Kunimi had passed by them, the dumbfounded artist would have tried to find a way. In his dreams, Atsumu tries to paint Kunimi’s bare body from memory. The slope of his hairline, where his bangs hang over one side of his forehead, one of his eyes bathed in partial shadow. The part where his hair is longer, but only slightly, hangs down the side of his face, tucked only slightly behind his ear. On his exposed ear is an earring, sparkling in the light that flickers over his head. A flash of silver stud and inlaid crystal glass. The bridge of his nose, the swell of his cheeks. The curve, the tender folds of his lips, the place where all of Atsumu’s dreams come to rest. A small frown that settles down his jaw, that diffuses into soft smiles, sly smirks.

* * *

Atsumu lets his hands wander further and further down Kunimi’s sides. “This is still a language of love, after all.” Lets his fingers stray further than they need to, tucking them inside the warmth of the front of his jeans and lets his hand stay there, basking in heat.

“This is your language of love,” Kunimi says as Atsumu kisses the crook of his neck. Lets him draw circles around his shoulder blade. Leans back into his touch as he nips his teeth around the juncture.

“Every time you touch me, you tell me that you love me.” Kunimi moves against Atsumu in a way that feels almost like a ritual, like a practiced performance. Like something made just for them. “You tell me everything that I need to know whenever you tell me you want me.” Arches his back as Atsumu bites down a little harder. 

“And it’s like you don’t even have to say the words. You don’t have to say anything, Atsumu.” The words sound like candy on his tongue. “You say it every time you say you want to try to cook for me without burning the house down.” Lets Atsumu lick a stripe up his neck. “Every time you ask to sleep beside me. Whenever you let me put on another Hong Kong film that my father gave me.” Kunimi sighs shakily, breathlessly as Atsumu presses kisses on the bruises that have begun to form on his porcelain skin. “You show me you love me when you touch me, Atsumu. When you need me.”

* * *

Every time Atsumu looks at Kunimi, he wills himself to look away. Look away _ , _ he tells himself. Don't let yourself stare for more than a fraction of a second. You're nothing but another plaything of his, after all. Look away and pretend that you don't feel the seabed trenches move underneath your feet whenever he looks back at you. Will your hips to keep steady as he looks up at you through his lashes and wraps his lips around you, so soft and so pink, the only pair of lips that have found their way to you, the only pair of lips that you would let kiss you until you go soft, like a stream of water around the banks. Pretend that the water doesn't only eddy around you when he's with you. He’s nothing more than something to dip your feet into, a liquid creek to set your name in stone. Don't delude yourself that this, any of this, has something to do with you.

* * *

A star is falling down from the sky when he looks up. Atsumu tries to hold his hand out toward it, as if he’s trying to catch it, but it’s falling and falling and falling to no end. Instead, he looks back at Kunimi who’s sitting beside him and watches the stars in his eyes. Atsumu feels a little woozy, even, whenever Kunimi watches him like he’s looking at the world. “You know, Akira.” Atsumu weaves the whole world into one name. Light-headed, drowsy. Lovesick, they called it. Osamu would have smacked him at the back of his head.  _ Bullshit,  _ he thinks,  _ if you’re in love, why would ya be sick? _

Kunimi hums and leans closer toward him, resting his head on his shoulder as he watches the stars tumble down the sky. Hot, yellow stardust on the green grass laid flat against his back. Atsumu’s old Inarizaki jacket allows his back to hover barely an inch above the wet ground. “What is it?” A gust of wind breezes past his hand that points up at the sky.

A stray leaf falls on the top of Kunimi’s head, and Atsumu moves to brush it away. “When I’m with you, time always slows down.” 

“What do you mean?” Kunimi asks, eyes still trained on the sky where feasts of stars had blossomed. “What do you mean by that?”

“When I’m lyin’ with you like this, it’s like there’s no need to rush anymore.” Atsumu clasps his hand in his. Fingers joined together in the dark of an hour. “It’s like all the time in the world slows down just for me.”  _ For us,  _ he wants to say, but admitting it would feel like a cold-blooded murder. A crime scene that he desperately wanted to avoid. He shakes the guilt off his hands and lets Kunimi pull away. Cold, red blood splattered on the sidewalk. Hundreds and hundreds of pairs of feet. Hundreds and hundreds of men who have walked upon this path once. Hundreds and hundreds of eyes.

Atsumu looks at Kunimi and sees the world stare back at him. The glint in Kunimi’s eyes resurfaces. Hundreds and hundreds of the gazes of all of the lovers in the world crammed into the eyes of just one boy, all for another to see. How could he get so lucky?

* * *

And so Atsumu pans his eyes over the course of Kunimi’s body as he comes all over his own thighs and over the softness of Kunimi’s stomach, both of them now bathed in white. He looks at him like he might disappear the next day or the day after that, clenching his teeth as he tried not to let them chatter from the cold of the boy’s body. Exaltation dealt out in the same abundance as waterfalls, his praise falling off his lips like an avalanche sweeping downhill like his body had gone through a drought before meeting Kunimi. But he knows all too well that morning, he would be nothing more than a memory of the night before again. His body spun into yet another chronicle under the dead of the night, preserved to pass down to other generations. His memory suspended into the air, floating in his dreams like a balloon that had once been lost but now found.

Every night they spend in bed, Atsumu is reminded that Kunimi is nothing but a dream. He is reminded that he’s nothing but another vision, an apparition. A portrait of the night before blown away in flames. A boy caught in a radial blur, amidst the flickering ashes of overwhelming desire. But Kunimi’s kissing him now, kissing him like the world would end tonight, like the world was standing right in front of him, and he realizes that maybe, just maybe, he couldn’t care any less that this would never end like he hopes it to do. All he knows is that, with Kunimi’s face in the middle of his thighs, giving him head and choking out a litany of curses, he doesn’t want this to end. Not today, not tomorrow, not in a million years.

And so, Atsumu doesn’t let him go. Holds his body closer to him, tucks him underneath the sheets. Kisses him before he goes to sleep, kisses his forehead once he’s asleep. Kisses him once more when he stirs in his sleep, looking lost, looking like a small child. Atsumu doesn’t ever want to let him go. Even just for tonight. He doesn’t feel Kunimi pull his hand away from him under the sheets. They let their hands turn into something gold, something immortal. Their hands memorialized into one frame, even just for tonight. His hands shaped into a globe, his body forming tender, swollen landmarks on all the places where Kunimi had touched him.

Atsumu closes his eyes into the distance of the night. Kunimi does not move away, does not twist away from his grip. Instead, he inches closer toward Atsumu. The night dances above them, the sky closer to the earth than before. Closer and closer still. A star falls on Kunimi’s bangs. One on the corner of his mouth, near the swell of his cheek. Another on the side of his face. He leans down and kisses it all away. He seals the whole world in just one kiss.


End file.
